Really?! Nokia CEO says multi-core processors are a waste

I’ve written rather positively about Nokia since it made its deal with Microsoft a little over a year ago. Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, has been a commendably honest and forthright CEO for the last year, but it looks like that’s changing. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper, Elop has criticized all phones with dual-core and quad-core processors. Yes, he’s insulted the very technology that Nokia will undoubtedly use very soon.

“The so-called dual-core, quad-core mobile phones can only waste batteries, but not be useful for consumers all the time,” he told the Yangcheng Evening News (as translated by ITPortal).

So Stephen Elop hates multi-core processors, huh? Not likely. In fact, Nokia will probably announce dual-core or quad-core phones by the end of the year. The problem is that Windows Phone currently doesn’t support anything but single-core processors, but that will change with an OS update later this year. Is he going to tell us that 720p HD screens are terrible next? That seems just as silly, given that Windows Phone is limiting Nokia to a 800×480 pixel screen resolution. Is higher RAM a problem too? All Windows Phones have only 512MB.

There are undoubtedly some dual-core and quad-core processors that suck too much battery, but Nokia doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. The Finnish phonemaker finally released its big gamble, the Lumia 900 (review), on AT&T in April and it has worse battery life than some of the quad-core and dual-core phones Elop is criticizing. The Droid Razr Maxx (and Droid Razr), for instance, has a dual-core processor and 4G LTE to contend with, yet gets at least 4 hours more talk time than the Lumia 900.

I like Windows Phone and I like Nokia’s new direction with Lumia, but Elop has gained a lot of good press by being honest. It’s recent smear campaigns against the iPhone and statements like these are the kind of crap that we don’t need to see, yet it’s what Nokia and Microsoft have been doing since December, when they labeled Android as too complex and the iPhone as uncool. I hate to say it, guys, but until you start selling enough units to actually compete with those “complex” and “uncool” smartphone operating systems, criticizing them like this makes you look silly.